


Perseverance

by Dienaziscum



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel, Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Blood and Gore, Gunshot Wounds, HYDRA Trash Party, M/M, Past Rape/Non-con, Physical Abuse, Slurs, Threats of Violence, Vomiting, depiction of onscreen rape is brief and nonexplicit, mention of past rape is brief and offhanded
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-05
Updated: 2019-01-05
Packaged: 2019-10-05 16:01:26
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,284
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17328113
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dienaziscum/pseuds/Dienaziscum
Summary: The Winter Soldier gets shot in the gut during a mission, but--despite increasing complications--continues pursuing his targets. Rumlow and Rollins provide dubious motivation. Murphy is just along for the ride (note: Murphy is an OC originated by the various authors of the 4F-verse).





	Perseverance

“It’s not going to be a problem, is it?” Rumlow asks. The asset recognizes the statement for what it is: as much a taunt as a query in need of response. The wound the asset has sustained was a target’s lucky shot, but not too lucky; said target is steadily expiring at their feet now, dark blood spurting from a spectacular tear in his thigh and disappearing into the knee-deep jungle mud through which they’ve been trekking since 0350.

 

The asset grinds his teeth and huffs out a sharp, angry breath. Rumlow’s absurd pompadour gusts back and collapses a bit; he scowls and drags a hand through the gel-snagged mess in irritation. That, at least, is pleasing.

 

Less pleasing is the way Rumlow’s got his bare index finger jammed into the entry wound at the asset’s midline, just between two plates of body armor. He roots it around a little at the asset’s failure to respond, like he’s making a perfunctory effort to feel for a bullet and not just enjoying the squelch.

 

It is an effort not to cave his skull in just to demolish that toothy, too-white grin he’s sporting. There is a mission still to complete.

 

The dying target is one of five. The asset has no intention of discontinuing the mission until five of five are neutralized.

 

“It won’t be a problem,” the asset confirms. The caliber of the bullet had not been impressive. There’s little blood and no exit wound he can feel, and the lancing pain through his gut is sharp but manageable.

 

“Should--should we not bandage that up, or---?”

 

“Shut the fuck up, Murphy," say Rollins and Rumlow in chorus.

 

Murphy hasn’t been a rookie for a long time, but he still slips up and gets soft sometimes. It’ll get him killed, eventually, but the asset doesn’t mind the guy’s occasional idiocy when it doesn’t cause a tactical shitshow. He’d slipped the asset some Hershey bars, once. Cigarettes, another time. Extra bottles of water, after a STRIKE tag team that’d left the asset boneless and decimated.

 

Predictably, Rumlow and Rollins start bickering. The asset sighs and allows himself a three-second fantasy of shooting the both of them in the head. What joy, to never again endure their inefficiency.

 

He doesn’t wait for Rumlow’s order to move out. That stirs up a real ruckus of jibes from Rollins and the two ancillary operatives running this mission, all of whom, the asset notes, have demonstrated (understandable) difficulty in acknowledging Rumlow’s field command.

 

They don’t get hit with a few hundred volts’ worth of subdural shock to ease that difficulty. The asset does, and that’s fine. Worth it, to watch Rumlow embarrass himself with all his posturing and the glee with which he mashes down the subdural collar’s trigger.

 

Three targets later, the gunshot still isn’t a problem. If the asset’s pace has slowed, there’s the sucking, wretched mud and the thick mess of vine-draped trees to blame. All of them, the asset included, have slipped and stumbled and gone face-first into the muck more than once by now.

 

They’d shown him a movie, once. _Predator._ A muscle-bound parody of a soldier all painted in jungle dirt, undetectable to the alien’s infrared sensors. If only the real-world scum they’re trudging through could leach away the itchy heat of his own sweat-slicked skin like that, quell the boiling knot of agony in his abdomen.

 

The asset snorts a mirthless laugh. The butt of Rumlow’s rifle cracks against his spine just between the shoulder blades, and the laugh tangles up in his throat, becomes choking.

 

The coffee-ground glob of crap that hurks up out of his throat is, maybe, a problem.

 

“Huh,” he says, listing sideways. Unacceptable. He overcorrects, and for a moment, the whole seething jungle fades to a whitewashed blur. Crud clusters up at the back of his mouth and make him gag, and another congealed hunk of it slithers, darkly red, past his lips.

 

“ _Fuck,_ that’s disgusting,” Rumlow sneers, and then there’s a lot of jostling and grumbling and barked orders as the asset staggers backward and disrupts the tight line of their three-man rear guard. Rollins gets knocked onto his ass and sits waist-deep in greyish sludge. The asset turns, graceless in attempting to break his own fall, and sprawls half-atop him with his knee in Rollins’ groin and both hands sunk up to the elbows in the sort of fetid grit that’ll give the techs who maintain his arm an aneurysm.

 

Rollins starts bitching and elbows the asset in the cheekbone.

 

Soft flesh in the asset’s hand, then, tendons and a fragile trachea crushing under his relentless cybernetic grip. Rollins sputters and thrashes uselessly, until he lands a knee in the asset’s gut.

 

All at once, Rollins’ face is painted brilliantly, shiningly red. He’s ripped the fucker’s head clean off, that must be it, except--Rollins’ mouth is still moving, still yelling, face a rictus of outrage and hysterical disgust.

 

Ah. So there’s all the blood that hadn’t spilled when the bullet had hit. He’s just vomited it up right on Rollins’ mug. It really is disgusting. The asset can understand his upset, even as everything’s starting to tilt dangerously sideways.

 

“Real nice, dumbshit,” Rumlow snarls, hauling him up out of the mud by the hair. He shakes him like a dog, chastising, and the asset smirks all askew, imagines Rumlow rolling up a year-old newspaper left behind in some shitty safehouse and swatting him over the nose with it. _Bad soldier. Keep your bodily fluids to yourself._

 

A terrible, brittle sound rattles around his cranium. He’s making it. Keening, as his abdomen attempts to collapse in on itself, a black hole.

 

“Uh uh, hell no. Don’t you get fuckin’ weird on me now. You _said_ it wasn’t gonna be a _problem_ , soldier. Did you fuck up that status report, or are you gonna get your shit together and complete this mission?”

 

The asset can’t hear Rumlow’s words past the pounding rush of his own rabbiting pulse, but it’s not hard to read his lips.

 

“I’m operational,” he sputters.

 

“Yeah, you fuckin’ look it. Get up.”

 

He gets up.

 

They march on.

 

Night falls, and they’ve lost the last target’s trail. The target is just an idea gone squishy and indistinct at the back of the asset’s mind, but he remembers enough of her dossier and their recent intel to keep the team well-aimed. He remembers this even when they’re shocking him half out of his bones in the dank black cover of underbrush to keep him from clawing open his vest and ripping into his own stomac,h as if he might take hold of the ever-expanding agony there and crush it in his fist.

 

He’s too exhausted to struggle against the pain any longer, by dawn. They are tracking the target actively again thanks to a fresh influx of intel, but less than efficiently because the asset can’t force his feet to find the rhythm of the march. He keeps weaving into the blurred shadows of trees and juddering down to his knees when his body tries to shiver itself clean out of existence.

 

Murphy almost gets his temple cratered with a shot from the asset’s Sig Sauer when he offers the asset water for what feels like the hundredth time in the past hour.

 

He does not want the fucking water, no matter how his body screams for it. He will only puke it up again and waste the ten minutes thereafter writhing in the mud.

 

Yes, he is perfectly willing to die of dehydration, as long as he doesn’t have to put anything in his stomach ever again. No, he doesn’t care how many times Rumlow mashes his goddamn thumb down on the shock trigger.

 

Rumlow threatens to take a piss in his mouth purely in the interest of keeping the mission on track. Murphy blanches a bit, and Rollins reminds him that while gutshots are a horrendously slow way to die, getting one’s dick chomped off by a delirious asset is guaranteed to do the job quickly and no less agonizingly.

 

The asset smiles, all blood and bile, to confirm.

 

“Christ. I can’t look at this anymore; it’s embarrassing,” Rumlow grumbles. “Get him in position and let’s wrap this up already.”

 

“What, you think I’m toting his sorry ass up that cliff?” Rollins says. “I’m not his goddamn babysitter. Out here in hell’s own bayou getting puked on and listening to all his sniveling and now I’ve gotta play piggyback. This is bullshit.”

  
The asset is inclined to agree.

 

Rollins hooks him around the waist in one meaty arm and half-drags him up the slippery incline. The asset bites through his own tongue trying to stifle the raw animal sounds that want to crawl out of his throat at the movement. He gets dumped unceremoniously onto a rock ledge near the peak, where ostensibly he can make a partial sight at 900 meters out from the target’s current location.

 

Easy, if he could just get his elbows braced on the rock without the molten-lava morass of his guts trying to burn their way out of his abdominal cavity and straight through the shale.

 

Rollins kicks him in the ribs. “Quit being such a pussy.”

 

“How can I, with you and half of STRIKE getting your dicks wet in it every other day,” the asset wheezes, when he stops seeing stars and figures out how to breathe again. That’s all he needs, really. Just a few more breaths, and the job will be done, and he can pass the fuck out. Maybe they’ll leave him up here to rot. He’d be a lot of dead weight to hump back down the hill, and the maggots and mosquitos would make quick work of his corpse. But first--

 

Breathe in, hold, breathe out.

 

Target lock.

 

Breathe in, ignore the screaming of scrambled soft tissue. Hold. Squeeze the trigger. Confirm hit.

 

Breathe out. Crumple up into a ball. Lose consciousness. _Lose consciousness._

 

Goddamnit.

 

He is awake when Rollins hauls him up into a fireman’s carry. Aware of Murphy’s squeamish distress at the gummy yellowish smear he’s left behind on the rough rock, all laced with rusty red. Alert enough to clock the hours as they slide by, glacial, awaiting extraction and enduring the flight back to base. But he is patient, and he mostly doesn’t forget to keep quiet, because pain is no more tolerable when given voice than not. He can wait for the oblivion of cryostasis; he’ll welcome it, will even tolerate the swarm of medics that will poke and prod at him before finally he slips under.

 

He breaks five of Rumlow’s ribs when Rumlow flips him over to fuck him. He doesn’t mean to; he intends to stay limp, can’t really imagine coordinating any kind of movement at all, except Rumlow is an artless moron and braces himself mid-thrust with the heel of his hand planted dead-center on the asset’s belly.

 

Everything goes murky for a long while, or perhaps it’s not long at all, after that.

 

He is in a chair, but not The Chair, restrained, surrounded by white coats and gleaming stainless steel. The whirring of buffers. The sharp acrid scent of machining polish. The techs are chewing STRIKE a whole new set of assholes for the disastrously mucked-up state of the asset’s arm.

 

He is crying. It’s a detached sort of sobbing. An involuntary reflex, triggered by his torso being flayed to pieces from the inside out. But the medics have already been at him; there’s the stink of betadine and a flash of white gauze when he manages to make the room stop spinning and can angle his gaze briefly downward.

 

No IV in his arm, though, and no mind-melting sludge getting dumped into his system, as would be the usual precursor to going on ice.

 

“...deploy in 56 hours, so there’s plenty of time to prep him and give a mission brief, now that he’s stable and...”

 

He is stable. This is _stable._ He has previously misunderstood the term, it seems.

 

“...gunshot to the stomach, but with the serum, it shouldn’t be a problem. Honestly, I’m more concerned about the functionality of the arm at this point. We’ll only have time for one full test session after the repairs.”

 

He is going to have to revise his definition of the term problem as well. This is fine. He can be flexible. He can be functional. He can be operational, even. Surely, after they wipe him, he won’t remember how to feel this much pain over one little hit with a 9mm.

 

“Yeah, and that’ll mean no time for a wipe, but his programming has held up pretty well on prior ops when he’s been out this long. Anyway, you’re right. We’ll just toss him in his holding cell until STRIKE B is geared up and ready to go. It won’t be a problem.”

 

As it turns out, for these two particular technicians, the asset makes himself a lethal problem. But a visit from Pierce and a reacquaintance with the many versatile uses of stun batons reminds him how not to be a problem, reminds him that he is not the sort of throwaway pawn who is allowed, given native weakness of character and composition, to react to a single gutshot as if it is anywhere in the vicinity of a problem.

 

“Thank you,” he says, when Pierce stares him down with brows slightly arched, waiting.

 

“It’s not going to be a problem, is it?” Pierce asks, thumbing over the scab-tacky gauze that covers the bullet wound.

 

The asset shakes his head. “No, sir. Ready to comply.”


End file.
